Yashasvi Juyal’s debut feature, The Ink-Stained Hand and The Missing Thumb, situates itself between a yearning-infused wait and lingering tentativeness preceding a transition. Premiering at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2026 in Proxima Competition, Juyal’s film wields unearthly bewilderment with a grounded touch. Something bizarre happens early in the film, which Juyal handles credibly, playfully and also despairingly. It’s this tonal oscillation in response to an incredible event that makes this film metaphysically slippery and a tragicomic jewel.

Santosh (Dheeraj Kumar) and Rajji (Bhumike Dube) are co-workers and lovers. They manage toll booths on a North Indian highway. There’s ample time to kill as their night shifts drag on; in between, one nudges the other for a glance or mild chatter. Their booths are on the same stretch. There have been differences between the couple regarding bracing for the near future. Conversation is suddenly halted one night when a truck crashes into Santosh’s booth. The explosion isn’t depicted but Dube’s face registers the jolt, the devastation surging in. Bereaved, Rajji isolates herself in her room. Grief is a peculiar thing, warping memory and imagination into projections.

A surreal twist ensues. Resurrected, Santosh washes up on a river bank. But he’s dressed unlike himself. Is it him? Something in him has dislodged. Santosh’s uncanny return is startling until it enmeshes into the natural. There’s puzzled shock, disbelief, amusement, an impulse to vest him with divine proof. Questions swing into probing him about the day’s gap between his death and re-emergence. Where was he? Can he share what afterlife, though brief, was like? Those initially stunned gradually accept his return matter-of-factly. Life intervenes with its demands before people can continue wallowing in hesitance. Juyal seizes onto the absurdity with delicious abandon. Several emotional notes are struck in the return’s wake: mischief, resentment, grudging and everything rushing forth just as fine without Santosh. For some, his death also leads to opportunities.

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Time. How much do we really know or understand about it? Or, where does the thought of time even lead us? Perhaps, rather than being led somewhere, the essence lies in simply dwelling within the thought itself — that asking the question is more vital than finding the answer. ​There are places where time seems to stand still — suspended between arrival and departure, at the intersection of memory and forgetting, on the border of life and death. Yashasvi Juyal’s debut feature, The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb, captures just such a space: a lonely toll booth on the edge of a rapidly changing landscape. There, a love story slowly transforms into a deep meditation on loss, existence, and the fragile traces we leave behind.

​The film begins in a simple world. Rajji and her fellow migrant workers live a repetitive life at a toll booth — a place built only for passage. People arrive, pay, and move on; yet the workers remain trapped in a strange, middle state. They are never fully part of the cities they serve, nor can they ever truly return to the homes they left. They live in a state of perpetual movement, yet they never quite arrive.

​This fragile existence shatters when Santosh, Rajji’s lover and colleague, dies in a truck accident at the booth. The station, once a place of routine, becomes a landscape of grief. But twenty-four hours later, Santosh mysteriously returns. He seems alive, yet there is a change in his very being. Is he a hallucination born of Rajji’s sorrow? A supernatural presence? Or simply a memory that refuses to fade? Juyal wisely offers no easy answers. But that is where the beauty lies. We are left without an answer, yet we remain caught in that game of questioning, and we dream.

​What is remarkable about The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb is that it does not treat its spectral premise as horror. Santosh’s return is not frightening; it is deeply melancholic. His presence becomes an extension of love, of grief, and the human longing to hold onto what has already vanished. The supernatural here is not an escape from reality, but another way to understand it.

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Indian independent cinema’s impressive global streak continues with Yashasvi Juyal’s The Ink-Stained Hand & The Missing Thumb, a formally rigorous and intricate love-loss-longing mesh.

Juyal’s debut feature will be premiered at the ongoing Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the competition section. Juyal’s previous short films include The Last Rhododendron and Rains Don’t Make Us Happy Anymore.

The Ink-Stained Hand & The Missing Thumb takes place in a town called Nagina. It’s 2003, a time in which time itself moves slowly and to a different beat.

The lovers Santosh (Dheeraj Kumar) and Rajji (Bhumika Dube) work at a highway toll booth, avidly consume a television science programme anchored by Professor Pluto (Sudarshan Juyal) and contemplate their future. Rajji has barely recovered from Santosh’s sudden death when he turns up at her doorstep.

Is the revenant a ghost with unfinished business, a grief-stricken Rajji’s waking dream, or a symbol of the creeping urbanisation that is altering their surroundings?

The experiences of Santosh, Rajji and others in the town unfold within boxy, intimate compositions created by the 4:3 shooting ratio. The cinematography, editing, colour palette and production design all evoke a world that is real in its texture but magical in its possibilities.

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Yashasvi Juyal did not pitch his way into filmmaking. He shot his way in.

“We never went through the route of pitching from development,” the Indian filmmaker says of “The Ink Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb,” his debut feature, which premieres in the Proxima Competition at Karlovy Vary. “We shot the film and then we started pitching.”

The film follows Rajji, a toll booth worker in North India, whose lover Santosh dies in a truck accident and returns 24 hours later as a spectral presence, drifting between memory and the disappearing world of the highway toll booth where they worked. For Juyal, the setup was not a genre exercise. It was reporting.

“Ghost for us is something which exists. We don’t believe that it’s in stories,” Juyal says of growing up in the upper Himalayas, where the film’s supernatural register comes from. “Many times we just talk about it naturally that, ‘Oh, you saw a ghost yesterday?’ My friend say, ‘Oh, I saw day before yesterday.’ So, it’s like as common as that, and we all have had our experiences in the upper Himalayas.”

That folklore has a specific source. “It’s also a tribute to my grandmother,” Juyal says, “because my grandmother used to live in a village in the upper Himalayas, and she had this relation with the supernatural that she used to tell me very naturally.”

The film’s central character is drawn from life. Juyal had interviewed real toll booth workers for a short documentary, and one of them, also named Santosh, was living with a girlfriend near the booth who was saving money for a physics degree while their relationship strained under the pressures of work and separation. Toll stations, Juyal notes, are also some of the most dangerous spots on India’s highways, with accidents a near-constant occurrence. Running into the real Santosh again amid that backdrop, Juyal asked him if the danger scared him. “I said that, ‘You’re still working here, are you not scared?’” Juyal recalls. “So, he said that, ‘I am not that, I have died and I am a ghost.’” The joke became the seed of the film.

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Yashasvi Juyal’s The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb, premiering in competition at Karlovy Vary, began as a Netflix Take Ten pilot before being reshaped into a feature with support from Visions Sud Est, Red Sea Fund and Hong Kong. Mentored by Spike Lee and backed by executive producer Shaunak Sen, the film blends montane ennui with a surreal afterlife tale set in 2003 Dehradun.

Yashasvi Juyal’s debut feature, The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb, premiering in the competition section at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival was meant to be the pilot episode of a Netflix series. 

Juyal was part of Netflix’s Take Ten cohort, receiving a grant from the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity to make a fully funded pilot for a potential series.

“I was inspired by the pilot of Twin Peaks by David Lynch. The pilot was a standalone feature — and it premiered at Telluride. During the mentorship program, Varun Grover even said that the pilot need not just be a 30-40 minute episode, but it can be a standalone IP. That really inspired me,” Juyal tells THR India. 

After the pilot was made, left to his own devices, Juyal decided to re-sculpt it into a feature film, with additional grants from Visions Sud Est, Red Sea Fund, and Hong Kong. At the Red Sea Film Festival, he was even mentored by Spike Lee who sat with the film and shed feedback. At Doc Producing South, Juyal pitched the film to Shaunak Sen who came on board as Executive Producer.

There are also a bevy of producers — Bhavna Kankaria, Neha Kaul, Sharib Khan Vikas Kumar, and Viraj Sikand. “The film was only possible because of the support, because they believed in my voice,” Juyal notes. It is a distinctive voice dripping in montane ennui — shots that are in no urgency to arrive at their meaning; cuts that are in no urgency to usher in subsequent meaning; conversations that taper out without resolution; images that linger, watching characters smoke till they reach the stub of their cigarette. 

Set in 2003, The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb follows Santosh (Dheeraj Kumar) and Rajji (Bhumika Dube), lovers who work at a highway toll booth. Rajji is not only obsessed with the television science programme anchored by Professor Pluto (Sudarshan Juyal) — inspired by Doordarshan’s Brahmand: The Universe, she also wants to find a way out of this town, while Santosh is content with the slow inertia of a life barely leaving behind its imprint. Santosh’s sudden and shocking demise corrodes the film’s slow drift, as does his miraculous return from the maws of death, pushing the film into knotty questions of the science and mythology of afterlife and of time’s relative flux.

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Ameya Gore’s documentary Going Solo is about two Indian women who participate in a gruelling long-distance endurance cycling event in the United Kingdom. Neither woman is young – one is a grandmother. Their bodies often don’t listen to them and there’s a gap between aspiration and ability.

Yet, Gareema Shankar and Renu Singhi pedal away, aiming to cover 1,540 kms in five days on the London-Edinburgh-London route. Going Solo is inspirational, but it’s a bit more than that. The film is about women yearning to be free, to be taken seriously, to achieve goals that they have set entirely for themselves.

The documentary was screened on Tuesday at the ongoing Mumbai International Film Festival. The screening witnessed a full house and fulsome admiration for Shankar and Singhi, who were present along with Gore and the crew.

Singh said that she got interested in cycling while picking out bikes for her grandchildren. Shankar encouraged the crowd to “live for the day” and “keep doing adventure as much as you can”.

The audience possibly felt close to the women because Going Solo goes beyond cycling, providing a peek into their selves. Even as the film follows its subjects through strenuous workouts, Gore and cinematographer Vandita Jain pick up on the tensions and self-doubt that simmer beneath the surface, the balance between family duties and personal desires, the sacrifices and guilt unique to female achievers.

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The 28th SIFF Golden Goblet Award

“The Asian New Talent Best Screenplay goes to Ridham Janve for HUNTER’S MOON (India/Germany)”

“There is a profound complexity to what seems like a simple conceit on the surface. In terms of its power of expression and depth of thinking, this is a beautiful yet chilling fable, a deep inquiry into humanity and human nature.”

Shanghai International Film Festival

Ameya Gore’s documentary Going Solo is about two Indian women who participate in a gruelling long-distance endurance cycling event in the United Kingdom. Neither woman is young – one is a grandmother. Their bodies often don’t listen to them and there’s a gap between aspiration and ability.

Yet, Gareema Shankar and Renu Singhi pedal away, aiming to cover 1,540 kms in five days on the London-Edinburgh-London route. Going Solo is inspirational, but it’s a bit more than that. The film is about women yearning to be free, to be taken seriously, to achieve goals that they have set entirely for themselves.

The documentary was screened on Tuesday at the ongoing Mumbai International Film Festival. The screening witnessed a full house and fulsome admiration for Shankar and Singhi, who were present along with Gore and the crew.

Singh said that she got interested in cycling while picking out bikes for her grandchildren. Shankar encouraged the crowd to “live for the day” and “keep doing adventure as much as you can”.

The audience possibly felt close to the women because Going Solo goes beyond cycling, providing a peek into their selves. Even as the film follows its subjects through strenuous workouts, Gore and cinematographer Vandita Jain pick up on the tensions and self-doubt that simmer beneath the surface, the balance between family duties and personal desires, the sacrifices and guilt unique to female achievers.

While both women are affluent and blessed with supporting families, they are aware of how unconventional their mission is; how difficult their dreams can get not just themselves but also their relatives. Delhi resident Gareema Shankar toggles between preparing for the LEL event and attending to the needs of her school-going son.

Renu Singhi is seen sailing through the streets of Jodhpur while also cooking meals and doing a laundry run. Singhi says in the documentary that when she’s perched on her cycle saddle, she forges her “daily life and everything else”.

Mainstream cinema has its fair share of “adrenaline-pumping sports films”, Gore told Scroll. “There was no point in doing another one of those. I was more interested in human relationships and stories. The London-Edinburgh-London challenge was just an excuse to make the documentary.”

An alumnus of the Film and Television Institute of India, Gore was recruited by producers Sharib Khan and Vikas Kumar to direct Going Solo. Khan and Kumar were acquainted with Gareema Shankar.

“I was fortunate that the producers weren’t just looking for someone who could technically execute the film, but also someone who had their own say,” Gore said. “We met Gareema and told her at the outset that we weren’t looking at just a sports film. Would she be willing to open up about her personal issues? She gladly agreed. That’s when I felt that there was a story here.”

While hunting for another Indian woman who had signed up for the LEL challenge, the team met Renu Singhi. “The way I look at now is that one woman was over-protected and another one had to labour her entire life,” Gore said. “Both of them found their own ways out of it.”

Going Solo is divided between preparations for the UK event and the experience of the riders when they get there. Singhi travels with her family, a coach whom she calls Guruji and a shadow rider. Shanker is accompanied by her father, who looks out for her every step of the way.

The 70-minute documentary was filmed with one camera. A GoPro camera attached to the front of Shankar’s bike yields a single shot.

“The first thing that comes to mind when you think of a sporting event is a drone, but Vandita and I rejected the drone shot in the very first meeting,” Gore said. “We did take some more GoPro shots and they were very nice, but apart from that single shot, nothing else fit in the edit.”

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